Instagram’s obsession with classic cars in front of retro architecture in pictures

The #soloparking hashtag now has more than 240,000 posts. Why has a new generation of Instagrammers become obsessed with parked vintage cars?

As cities adopt moves against cars, Instagrammers are beginning to fetishise them. Particularly parked, classic cars. Adopting a kind of art-student-meets-parking-inspector viewpoint, vehicles are captured stationary and side-on with a backdrop of striking or even matching retro architecture.

The #soloparking hashtag is perhaps the driving force behind the aesthetic, after starting out as an Instagram community assignment in 2012 and now having more than 240,000 posts. This trend is about using the automobile-architecture aesthetic to evoke urban nostalgia. In fact, the photographers are often not even drivers.

Such is the case with Joerg Nicht, a Berlin-based photographer responsible for another popular hashtags defining the obsession, #asundaycarpic (with over 50,000 uses). I dont have a car. In a city like Berlin you dont even need a car, he explains. After snapping a photo of a stationery Fiat Cinquecento and naming it a Sunday car pic, a mini movement was born.